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On the sexual politics behind the upright man and his counterpoint: the inclining woman.

by ADRIANA CAVARERO

The Virgin and the Child with Saint Anne. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-19). Public domain.

Sexual and emotional inclination toward a person—for brevity’s sake, we’ll call it eros—stirs serious apprehension, above all among philosophers. They perceive it as a threat to the subject’s equilibrium—a deep quiver, a slippery slope. What they fear most of all are inclinations that are too impetuous and difficult to master. In the turbulent realm of eros, these include the inclination that turns to lust and other pleasures of the flesh—prominent among which is the alleged propensity of specifically female nature to lasciviousness.

In traditional ethics, this argument is often developed with particular passion, but it also appears in authors who would seem to be more open-minded. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the influential philosopher Pierre Proudhon, known for his innovative and revolutionary ideas, wrote some passages on this theme that are worthy of mention. In La pornacratie, ou les femmes dans les temps modernes he writes,

To speak of sexual relations, it is a law of nature in all animals that the female, incited by the instinct to have children, searches for a male in all manner of ways. Woman cannot escape this law. She is naturally more inclined to lasciviousness than man, first because her self is more fragile, such that liberty and intelligence struggle in her with less force against her animalistic inclinations, and secondly because love is the great, if not only, occupation of her life.

Despite his misogyny, or perhaps precisely because his prejudice does not spare even maternity, Proudhon’s words are ultimately thought-provoking. Following a widely accepted theory, Proudhon argues that love, with its pathologies and excesses, is essentially rooted in natural and animal phenomena related to sexual inclination, understood not as an orientation for a particular sex but as the instinct to have sex. He also suggests that, in women as in females of other species, this instinct is subordinated to the instinct for procreation. From this perspective, erotic and maternal inclinations spring from a core that is as imperious and indomitable as nature itself.

From his rebellious debut to modern day, the devil has always been a political figure.

by ADAM KOTSKO

A depiction of Satan being cast out of heaven, based on John Milton's Paradise Lost, engraved by Paul Gustave Doré, 1866. Public domain.

In the most recent presidential debate, Trump was unusually literal in demonizing his opponent, at one point calling Clinton “the devil.” While such rhetoric is foreign to presidential debates, it is commonplace in many conservative Christian communities, where liberal political leaders are often suspected of being the Antichrist. And while their readings of biblical prophecy are questionable at best, my research on the devil has convinced me that they are not completely on the wrong track: The devil has always been right at home in the political world.

The devil has always been right at home in the political world.

The title of my book, The Prince of This World, refers to an epithet that Jesus twice uses to describe the devil in the Gospel of John. It jumped out at me as a possible title because my project was to demonstrate that the devil was not solely a theological symbol, but also a political one. Though he is undoubtedly a rebellious prince, insubordinate to his rightful ruler, God, nonetheless he remains a prince.

It would be easy to dismiss this as mere imagery, but to do so would be to misunderstand the devil’s place within the worldview represented by the New Testament writings. The devil is of course not simply identical with human rulers, but he does engage in a rule that is not merely metaphorical or symbolic. In the world of the Gospels, he asserts control over individual human beings. As with most rulers, this control is mostly mediated through subordinates (demons), but on important occasions it can be more hands-on. For instance, in two of the Gospels (Luke and John) he personally possesses Judas Iscariot and incites him to betray Jesus.

Tomorrow is Foucault’s 90th birthday—mark the occasion by brushing up on his legacy.

Nearly three decades after his death Michel Foucault remains one of the most discussed thinkers in academia. Across the humanities and social sciences his work continues to be among the most cited, a distinction proportionate to the number of scholarly hats Foucault wore in life—including that of the philosopher, the historian, the social theorist, the philologist, and the literary critic. At the dawn of the millennium Le Monde declared his book, The Order of Things to be among its 100 Books of the Century—and more recently still, Buzzfeed listed Discipline and Punish as one of 15 College Books That Will Actually Change Your Life. His corpus, chiefly concerned with the inner workings of modern conceptions of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, continues to open minds and spur debate.

In honor of his 90th birthday we’ve curated a list of books which, running a gamut of disciplines, tussle with Foucault’s legacy. The titles below critically investigate Foucault’s notions of religion, politics, and social life, engaging some of his signature concepts and his key influences and interlocutors along the way.

Drawing on a series of Foucault’s lectures, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen explore a crucial question of contemporary political theory: how should we deal with state power? Common to Foucault’s various followers is an aversion to conventional forms of political organization—sympathies purportedly aligned with Foucault’s own antistatism. Yet, in pointing to the ambiguities of Foucault’s writings on the subject, State Phobia and Civil Society argues against the prevailing academic fashion that pits itself against the state. In so doing they aim to close the gap between the reductively radical “Saint Foucault” of grad school lore and the actual, political Foucault, restoring to him the nuance and complexity that his thought warrants.

ALSO SEE: Mitchell Dean’s piece, Rebel, Rebel?, comparing the legacies of Michel Foucault and David Bowie.

“I can only describe State Phobia in terms usually reserved for bestsellers: un-put-downable, a cause of sleepless nights.”

Antigone in front of the dead Polyneices by Nikiforos Lytras, 1864. Public domain.

The Use of Bodies coalesces around what, borrowing from Sophocles’ Antigone, Agamben calls the “superpolitical apolitical.” The phrase appears only twice in the volume, but it proves decisive.

What is it to live as superpolitically apolitical? It is to live and, at the same time, to think a politics “set free from every figure of relation” (and representation), in which, however, “we are together beyond every relation.”

This non-relational togetherness requires the “use of bodies”—in the subjective sense of the genitive. That is: another—unproductive, non-instrumental—body is possible for the human being, whereby a “zone of indifference” emerges between one’s own body and that of another. Use becomes common use.

The superpolitical apolitical also ambitiously involves deactivating the entire apparatus of Western ontology, beginning at least with Aristotle.

The superpolitical apolitical also ambitiously involves deactivating the entire apparatus of Western ontology, beginning at least with Aristotle. Ontology, as inextricable from politics, is in fact founded on the relation of the ban, which ultimately founds every relation. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life argued that the separation between natural life (zoè) and political life (bios), i.e. our understanding the anthropogenetic threshold as a fracture between life and language, is always accompanied by the banning (or better, the “inclusive exclusion”) of “bare life”, i.e. of a life deprived of its form, from the polis. The Use of Bodies complicates and substantiates this scenario. Ontologically, it is the very notion of the subject, the Aristotelian hypokeimenon as a singular existence that “must be at once excluded and captured in the apparatus.”

From the vantage of the overall montage of the Homo Sacer series, the slim volume Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm would appear to be at once peripheral and interstitial. Unlike any of the other volumes, it consists of two public lectures, rather than a newly crafted text. These lectures were delivered in October 2001 at Princeton, giving their reference to global terrorism a curiously diffracted and belated, though topical, echo. Stasis is situated between State of Exception (2.1) (a concept that is explicitly, if briefly, tied to civil war), and The Sacrament of Language (2.3) and a decimal point away from The Kingdom and the Glory (2.4), with which it entertains more tenuous links: its treatment of the thresholds between oikos and polis prepare possible interrogations on what becomes of these with the Patristic introduction of oikonomia, of divine management, while the tantalising foray into Hobbesian eschatology opens up a different avenue into a critique of the theocratic imagination, and resonates with a passing mention of Hobbes on the oath in Sacrament. Stasis was also published in Italian a few months after the final volume with which Agamben “abandons” the project, The Use of Bodies.

Over and above its specific thesis and position, Stasis also presents us with two miniatures or models of the theoretical archipelago of Homo Sacer as a whole. I will try to elucidate this point with special focus on the first essay, “Stasis.” In a gesture that is a veritable signature of Agamben’s thought, he identifies a tremendous lacuna in our thinking, one that he proceeds if not to fill at least to delineate, in a mix of problematizing modesty and forceful conviction (or, depending on your taste, conceit). A science is pronounced missing. Here, the science of civil war itself, a stasiology that contemporary polemology is incapable of producing but which becomes all the more urgent as civil war becomes more pervasive.

As Agamben asserts: “It is generally acknowledged that a theory of civil war is completely lacking today, yet this absence does not seem to concern jurists and political scientists too much. … There exists, today, both a ‘polemology,’ a theory of war, and an ‘irenology,’ a theory of peace, but there is no ‘stasiology,’ no theory of civil war.” With characteristic erudition, a related contention governs the second essay, “Leviathan and Behemoth”:

It is easy to get lost in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical forest. Planted tree after tree, reference after reference, interpretation after interpretation, thesis after thesis, book after book, for more than two decades, the Homo Sacer series is vast and manifold. It can hardly be surveyed with a single, sweeping glance. Here and there are clearings—his external texts such as The Open and The Time That Remains, Profanations and Nudities—that help the dedicated reader not so much to get oriented, as to get some air and sun before heading back into this predominately dark woodland. But now, with The Use of Bodies, Agamben’s ninth and last installment, we discover the limits of this botanical metaphor. In retrospect we can see that his literary project, composed with quiet determination and unrivaled mastery, is actually structured like the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. Despite Agamben’s predilection for archaic sources, he has written the perfect guidebook to our still young but already scarred twenty-first century as it grows old and decrepit.

In The Use of Bodies, Agamben deploys a revealing quote that can function as a useful epigraph for his lifework: “The historical vocation is always that of transforming the already-given into what is given-as-task.” This Heideggerian formulation can correct a common misreading of Homo Sacer. The series is not a description of a distinct problem that we ought to either solve or transcend. The progressive attempt to include the person who is being excluded makes little difference from this perspective. There is no “before and after” in Agamben’s thought: the misery of our current politics is the only place where the potentiality of the politics to come can be found. To use Agamben’s own words from his Prefatory Note to the final volume, “In a philosophical inquiry, not only can the pars destruens [the destructive, negative part] not be separated from the pars construens [the constructive, positive part], but the latter coincides, at every point and without remainder, with the former.” Which might sound like what Derrida calls deconstruction, but is probably closer to what Weil calls decreation.

As Agamben “abandons” the Homo Sacer project with the publication of The Use of Bodies, there arise a number of questions concerning the former’s seriality. What, for instance, governs the order and numbering of the volumes? And is the series ultimately convergent or divergent? Questions of this kind extend beyond the Homo Sacer project. As early as his first book, Stanzas, Agamben launches an inquiry into certain “zones of indetermination” that he would specify and develop under the “homo sacer” rubric. What first emerges from a retrospective glance at Stanzas, however, is not so much the intimation of a more expansive series as the surprising importance Agamben attributes to another term of mathematical modernity, namely topology, for, from the perspective of topology, the opening sections of the Homo Sacer project can be seen as a repetition of the Introduction to Stanzas.

With the publication of The Use of Bodies, Agamben’s monumental Homo Sacer project has now come to an end. Notwithstanding Agamben’s characterization, in the book’s “Prefatory Note,” of the project as now being abandoned rather than completed, future readers of the nine-volume series will inevitably have an impression of the project as a closed whole—and with good reason: though written over a period of twenty years and spanning an astonishing spectrum of times and topics, there is a remarkable continuity of concern and argument presented across the volumes, with this last offering something resembling a final cadence. In his contribution to this forum, Adam Kotsko notes how the organization of Agamben’s project often seems carefully planned, but at other times can appear quite open to contingency, modification, and digression. And certainly, anyone who has read Agamben’s work, both within and beyond the Homo Sacer project, knows that he is illuminating when writing not only on, say, Heidegger or Benjamin, or Aristotle, but also on Don Quixote, on Orson Welles' Don Quixote (at least six minutes of it), on Pinocchio, on Pygmalion, on Paracelsus, on Pope Benedict XVI. . . . But while many of Agamben’s short essays, aphoristic vignettes, and even passing remarks over the years might come across as unique gems, one striking fact that can be observed from what is now a panoramic retrospective view of Agamben’s work is the uncanny way they often turn out, after intervals of many years, to be crucial elements in the system of his thought. I will give just two of many possible examples.

Since its inception over two decades ago, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series has emerged as one of the most ambitious, influential, and hotly debated intellectual projects of our time. As Agamben brings this series to a close—or, in his words, “abandons” it—with The Use of Bodies, this blog event will explore the stakes of the project as a whole from a variety of perspectives. Kevin Attell takes a very Agambenian approach of jumping between the micro- and macroscopic view, highlighting the unexpected contribution of what might initially have appeared as isolated bons mots to Agamben’s systematic concerns in the Homo Sacer project. Peter Fenves connects Agamben’s most famous project to his less well-known early works, guided by Agamben’s use of the concept of topology. The concept of form-of-life, arguably the most crucial in all of Agamben’s work, is at the center of David Kishik’s contribution, which also gathers materials from Agamben’s earlier writings as well as more recent texts that fall outside the Homo Sacer architectonic. By contrast, Alberto Toscano provides an account of the place of Stasis—an “in-between” volume of the series that was paradoxically published after its official concluding (or abandoning) installment—and what Nicole Loraux, one of Agamben’s most important interlocutors, can tell us about what remains unthought in Agamben. Lorenzo Chiesa focuses on teasing out the political implications of Agamben’s work, as clarified in light of The Use of Bodies.

In order to understand any major thinker and their legacy, it is important to consider their context—a truism that is very hard to put into practice, especially when the thinker in question belongs both to the recent past but is still very much a part of our present. In part, this explains the wealth of discussion swirling around the recent passing of a certain protean pop icon who left behind a singular era-defining legacy. It’s also for this reason that another standout cultural figure of the seventies—a certain French philosopher—has become so difficult to situate in our contemporary moment.

I speak, of course, of David Bowie and Michel Foucault whose political projects paralleled one another in intriguing ways. Whether in the intellectual works of the philosopher, or the records and performances of the artist, both men were concerned with questions of identity, whether sexual or personal; both focused on the persona or the construction of subjectivity rather than the more fixed humanist subject; both supported and even celebrated the marginal—whether incarnated as Bowie’s space alien or Foucault’s “abnormals” produced through disciplinary knowledges; and both made the experience of madness, transgression and intensity part of their art or thought. Both would also go on to develop an aesthetics of the self, turning life and ultimately death into a work of art or self-transformation. Blackstar, Bowie’s last album, was released days before he succumbed to cancer and Foucault’s final two volumes of History of Sexuality were published in the weeks preceding his death. With these swan songs, the pop star and the intellectual celebrity each died with a flourish and left us with work that spoke to and beyond their own deaths. Indeed, like this album, Foucault’s very last lectures, delivered when he surely suspected his condition was terminal, meditate on death and demise.

Whether in the intellectual works of the philosopher, or the records and performances of the artist, both men were concerned with questions of identity, whether sexual or personal; both focused on the persona or the construction of subjectivity rather than the more fixed humanist subject; and both supported and even celebrated the marginal.

A brief note on the life and works of a seminal philosopher, historian, and literary critic.

by EMILY-JANE COHEN

René Noël Théophile Girard, 1923-2015. Photo by Norris Pope.

On November 4th, venerated Stanford French Professor René Girard died in his sleep at age 91. The historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science was known around the world for his hypotheses of “mimetic desire” and of “the scapegoat mechanism,” which have been taken up in fields as disparate as anthropology, sociology, theology, and economics. Entire foundations exist to further the insights and implications of Professor Girard’s research. His impact is such that he was hailed as “The Darwin of the Human Sciences” upon his election to the Académie Française in 2005.

The staff of Stanford University Press extends its deep condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Professor Girard. He was a vital asset to the Stanford community and to the broader community of scholars and students we serve, and his impact will endure through all of his books and those of the many people he continues to inspire.

Emily-Jane Cohen is Executive Editor at Stanford University Press, acquiring in literature and literary criticism, philosophy and theory, and religious studies and theology.

Why does Foucault—an avowed anti-humanist—turn to “rights” in his later works?

by BEN GOLDER

Former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with the English version of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, November 1949. Public domain.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on December 10, 1948. The result of two years of drafting by a committee of the Commission on Human Rights—whose famous chair was Eleanor Roosevelt—the text of the Declaration itself stands as an enduring testament to the global and supposedly universal appeal of these (newly declared) human rights norms. After all, the Commission had been chosen to be broadly representative of the world’s diverse cultures and civilizations. Roosevelt was joined on the committee by René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, Peng Chung Chang of China and John Humphrey of Canada. Human rights today are admitted by their defenders and detractors to be the ‘lingua franca’ of global politics. They are the preeminent universalist discourse of our time, dissolving regional and religious differences in the universalist and morally appealing argot of human rights—and the Declaration is the Ur-Text of this universalism.

Are human rights really universal? Or are they merely the narrow inheritance of the Western Enlightenment or European modernity?

The Declaration concerns the “inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and it addresses itself to “everyone.” Human rights are not the rights of the citizen; they are not civil rights or civil liberties. They do not depend on one’s gender or one’s race, one’s creed or one’s class: they are the rights of the human as such. (As an aside, if you pick up a textbook on human rights almost at random, and open it to the first page, you will most likely encounter some variant on the following beguiling sentence: Human rights are the rights we have simply because we are human beings). Of course, there has been an almost interminable debate in human rights circles about the extent to which actually-existing human rights documents capture this universalist ambition. Are human rights really universal? Or are they merely the narrow inheritance of the Western Enlightenment or European modernity? Do they reflect ‘Asian Values’? Or Islamic values? Can they be derived from Confucianism or Ubuntu as readily as they can from the works of Locke or of Kant?

A few years ago at the annual Modern Language Association conference, it seemed to me that an inordinate number of panels were dedicated to discussions of animal life in literature, culture, and theory. In 2009 a special cluster in the MLA’s flagship journal, PMLA, heralded the official arrival of animal studies in the literary humanities, and a torrent of books and articles has ensued. Going forward, it looks as if strong interest in animals among humanities scholars will continue, as there are a number of established book series and journals now dedicated to the topic. And while I like animals as much as the next person, the Foucauldian in me became preoccupied with trying to figure out how animality had somehow become the “next big thing” in the world of humanities theory and criticism.

The theoretical discourse surrounding animal lives emerged on the scaffolding of the Big Theory era’s master thinkers—Jacques Derrida; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; and, most obviously, Foucault, whose work has been key in coming to grips with biopower (how various practices and concepts of “life”—gender, race, etc.—became central for power and knowledge in the modern and postmodern era).

One of the defining characteristics of our age is the radical breakdown of the human/animal distinction. In both the popular media and in scholarly scientific literature, we are shown almost weekly new pieces of evidence suggesting that the barriers separating humans from animals are not as impermeable as we once thought them to be. Behaviors and capacities widely believed to be unique among human beings are increasingly being discovered in varying forms and to varying degrees among a wide number of animal species.

The fundamental breakdown in the effort to delimit sharply human beings from animals has been an important intellectual and scientific development for philosophers and theorists, ranging from Aristotle to Agamben.

While philosophy’s historical reputation for being a leading voice of critical thought is often wholly deserved, on the issue of the distinction between humans and animals and the ethical worth of animals, it has unfortunately and frequently failed to live up to its more admirable ideals. In fact, in many ways, philosophy in the Western tradition has been one of the chief architects in constructing the traditional philosophical and ethical dogmas we have inherited concerning animals.

Mexican immigrants to the U.S. face a stigma that stretches back to ancient civilization.

by THOMAS NAIL

The "barbarian" raids of Rome were carried out by Germanic tribes.

Significant portions of the population of the United States believe that immigrants are naturally inferior. The attitude is not new. In fact, the idea of a natural political inferiority was invented in the ancient world, though it has repeated itself again and again throughout history—hence the persistence of the term “barbarian.” Originally used to classify those beyond the pale of ancient Greek and Roman society, “barbarian” has since been redeployed throughout all of history to designate one’s cultural and political enemies as “naturally inferior.” From the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie who called the migrant peasants in Paris “savage barbarians” to Nazi propaganda that described migrant Jews as “uncivilized oriental barbarians,” the perceived inferiority of migrant groups relative to the prevailing political centers has proven to be an enduring source of antagonism.

In the United States, and in the ancient empires, large military-style walls were built and guarded to control the movement of undesirable foreigners into the community.

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